Monthly archives for December, 2013

2013 is coming to an end. It’s an understatement to say that it was turbulent year. I left the organization that I worked at for 13 years and agreed to work for Inovativ. A decision I do not regret for a second. Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 were released. Together with my personal favorite Windows Azure Pack. We have done some really great projects with these products. I’ve started working in two times zones, GMT+1 (Netherlands) and PST (Redmond) and Lync has changed my world of communication.

But all these things pale in comparison with the people I have met. For a long time I lived with the mindset of keeping the knowledge for myself and did not see any reason of sharing it. It took me days or weeks to get some new feature figured out and I was not about to put in a lot of effort in documenting it, let alone putting it out on the web for everybody to grab. But at the same time, I searched the internet, very happy to find a solution someone posted.

In June 2012, I was at a SharePoint readiness session for partners at Microsoft. Don’t ask!! I was clearly at the right spot, but at the wrong time. The room filled with suits and ties. After a couple of sessions Robert Bakker (SSP Datacenter at Microsoft NL) walked in. Never saw the guy before. He started his session on Virtualization, so I resumed from hibernation. After a couple of slides he asked an open question. “Is there a question you have on the private cloud offering. You can ask me anything.” And for those who know me, yeah I had a couple of questions. I asked about multi-tenancy and the Dynamic Datacenter Suite (a really early version of Windows Azure Pack).

Nico van Veen (Partner Sales Manager Hosting & Cloud at Microsoft NL) that I work with closely nowadays, was my Partner Account Manager at the time. He jumped in, saying that no one in the room was understanding a word we were saying and asked us to continue that discussion at the end of the day. And so we did. Robert introduced me to Edie van den Berge (responsible for Hosting in NL at Microsoft at the time). I spoke with Edie and he advised me to contact Hans Vredevoort.

Hans was my first contact with the community. After some emails he agreed to meet me. We spoke for an hour or so and after 15 minutes we we already sitting behind a laptop looking at some designs. I proposed to write a blog on network virtualization for hyper-v.nu. He would review it and if it was good enough it was published. To be honest, I put in a lot of effort on that blog. I was not in a writing mode and had to figure out a way to not only document my findings but also make it readable for someone else. I have a background on networking, but this network virtualization was something else. There was almost no information out there at all. That only motivated me more to get a well tested and documented blog. Hans reviewed it and approved it. With the second blog on Windows Azure Services for Windows Server I earned my login credentials for hyper-v.nu. Since that moment I have had more and more contact with Hans. He shared a lot of information with me. He introduced me to his peers in the community and to members from the product teams. When I changed jobs and started at Inovativ we even became direct colleagues. We did some great project together and we complement each other in the knowledge we have and share. If I have to describe Hans in a couple of words, I’d say he is the embodiment of the community.

The second member of the hyper-v.nu community is Peter Noorderijk. This man is an organizer with every fiber in his body. And don’t mistake him for his knowledge on the Windows Server and System Center platform. Unfortunately most of the work that Peter does for the community goes unseen. Every event hyper-v.nu organized or hyper-v.nu was part of, Peter was a driving force behind the scenes. And not only behind the scenes. He’s a gifted speaker too. Always critical on the parts that did not go according to his high standards. We are very honored to have him as a part of hyper-v.nu and it is the combination of these talents that make it a great community.

In my opinion this man is the face of the community in the Netherlands. And for a reason. His relentless effort to give community members a platform is paying of more and more. Take the last Experts Live event. 550 seats sold out. Working until 2am the night before to get the last things organized and ready to rock the stage early the next morning. Maarten knows how to play a crowd and does this like breathing at bigger event like TechEd, MMS (sadly no more) and SCU. He knows how to get the best out of you, challenging you. Most of all he is an enabler. He provides the stage, you have to take it. He should start his own company with that talent, oh wait he did… I work there.

I met Didier in April where he spoke on Advanced Networking features at a hyper-v.nu event. I did a session on NIC Teaming, the Hyper-V switch and QoS. There was no overlap but we could have swapped sessions easily. The mutual interest in the same subject (networking) formed an initial base for a more frequent contact. We talked about issues we were encountering, we exchanged ideas and solution and often we would just ramble for an hour or more. We are both not only very enthusiastic about the things we do, but we also tend to talk that way. This enthusiasm is also present in his presentations and he does know how to throw some fun in there.

Aidan is the walking Hyper-V encyclopedia. And has also written it all down on his blog. There were times where I wondered if he had oil for lunch. Not only the sheer amount of blogs, but also the actual content and research that gone in to them, is mind blowing. But after I met him in Dublin I know for sure he is human. Nothing but respect for this man. I was close to a presentation once, but never actually had the privilege yet. 2014 will bring change to that. I’m sure of it. If you know some Hyper-V, you know Aidan, or at least visited his site a thousand times.

Aahh… Unsere deutschen freund! I have spoken with Carsten a couple of times and laughed my head of. What a great guy. But between the jokes he asks the most difficult questions and has answers to even more. Carsten is also putting in a lot of effort in the community. Besides his blogging he is a talented interviewer. I have seen numerous interviews recorded and performed by Carsten with MVPs, program managers and other community members. Think it is easy, I dare you. Try it. And not to forget the podcasts Carsten is doing. Every month a new podcast. And those things are an hour avarage. Can you imagine the time it takes to create them.

Patrick and I were, how should I put it, ….assigned… to the same event in Dublin. Because the hotel, where all the event attendees were staying, was fully booked I was located at another hotel. Well, at least I had time to catch up on some reading. In my 2 by 1 hotel room I noticed a tweet from Patrick saying he arrived at Dublin airport. Asked him if he was in Dublin for the same event and luckily he was. The next morning I went for breakfast. With sixty empty tables I found myself a table with some power supply next to it. Some morning reading on the NVGRE Gateway with a coffee and some toast. About 15 minutes later a guy positioned himself a couple of tables away, also for breakfast. He did have a familiar face. Laptop was still open so checked twitter again. Mmm.. small picture. Might be him. Only one way to find out. “Patrick?” “Yeah! Marc, I thought it was you”. We hanged out for two days. I had a lot of interesting conversations with Patrick and been in contact with him ever since.

Since the preview of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server I have been blogging about, speaking on and working with this great product. In the early days of the product there was almost no information available. One of the community members that was also publishing blogs about the Windows Azure Services for Windows Server was Kristian. Recently Kristian and me have more contact and it turns out that the type of projects we do are very similar. Together with Flemming Riis they have released a whitepaper on Network Virtualization, that is now turning in a series of whitepapers on the CloudOS we are doing in a joint effort.

I have had a couple of calls with Flemming about the whitepaper series. He actually build the environment for the NVGRE whitepaper. Flemming is enthusiastic but also very realistic. We first started talking about a book about the CloudOS, but with his insight into the effort it takes and the kind of work we are doing that would quickly become a very difficult adventure. Together with Kristian Nese we settled on a series of whitepapers.

I know Damian from all the work he is doing on getting the NVGRE story out there. Speaking at event, the blog series with Nigel Cain, webinars, you name it. Over time Damian is also putting more emphasis on Windows Azure Pack. I’m still aiming at a joined Windows Azure Pack session with him on TechEd this year.

I can also mention, Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Daniel Neumann, James van den Berg, Kevin Greene, Thomas Maurer, Gordon McKenna, Ronny de Jong, Darryl van der Peyl, and then some. All these guys have day jobs and usually work more than 40 hours a week. Besides their normal working hours they put in a lot of effort to learn and test new functionalities. They take screenshots, create diagrams and document it in an easy readable format and post in on the internet for you to read at no cost. They create PowerPoint presentations, give presentations, webinars, interviews, podcast and organize events. And they do all of this with a single purpose. Sharing knowledge. Behind every hyperlink in this blog post there is tons of valuable information and its free.

I learned that sharing knowledge is not a bottomless pit, but it forms the basis of gaining knowledge. I’m honored to be part of this community and I want to thank everyone that I was privileged to interact with this year.

Windows Azure Pack is getting the attention it deserves. Microsoft is doing a great job in blogging extensively about the endless possibilities with this crucial piece in the CloudOS vision. Since the initial preview of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server, which was recently succeeded by Windows Azure Pack, I have done a couple of series on some inner working.

These series were born because of personal interest or the amount of questions I got on a particular subject. I have worked closely with a lot of folks from Microsoft to get the most out of the solution. Their input, enthusiasm and willingness to help is just great.

About two months ago I had a couple of chats with Kristian Nese and Flemming Riis, who recently released the Hybrid Cloud with NVGRE (WSSC 2012 R2) whitepaper. Somewhere in those chats we spoke about a follow up on their whitepaper. The idea quickly became a little more concrete in a series of whitepaper about the CloudOS. As a result, I have been working on the next whitepaper for the last couple of weeks. This whitepaper describes the installation steps for different deployment scenarios. After the initial deployment a lot of post deployment tasks can/must be completed. The whitepaper describes the following subjects.

Introduction

Components

Designs

Prerequisites

Installation

Authentication

Administration

Troubleshooting

Is this documentation not already available somewhere, you ask? Well, yes and no. Microsoft has done a good job with a lot of documentation on TechNet and the folks from the program team are blogging like maniacs. My dear friend Hans Vredevoort had a great idea to start the WAP Wiki, that is the entry portal to all this information.

But we have been working with this product in actual deployments and have gained a lot of knowledge from that. The next whitepapers will be in line with the already released ones and will describe resource providers that can be configured in Windows Azure Pack.

The last weeks I have done a lot of reading, testing and configuring with ADFS in combination with Windows Azure Pack. Every part that is unraveled is tested in a complete production ready environment. With High Availability at all levels, separate domains for security reasons, etc. This last piece of information was necessary for the whitepaper. To give you a small teaser for the whitepaper, a screenshot from the ADFS portal for Windows Azure Pack for Inovativ.

We recently published a number of blogs (blog1, blog2) about network connectivity problems with our HP ProLiant Gen8 blade servers with Emulex adapters. Via the comment section on those blogs we saw we were not alone and several others were suffering from problems or even BSODs using other adapters than Emulex. Also Broadcom and Chelsio were reported as having issues. We can now also add Intel network adapters to the list (see afterthought at the end of this blog).

I just saw an interesting pointer by Didier van Hoye to a blog by Michael Rueefli aka Dr. MIRU from Switzerland, who suffered from BSODs after installing KB2887595 (November 2013 Update Rollup) on his Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V clusters using Intel 82599 dual-port 10Gbps network adapters. Michael traced the BSOD back to the Mslbfoprovider which is the core driver for the inbox NIC teaming in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Previously I referred to as KB2887595 as as an update containing a stealth update (replacing Windows binaries without documentation). Evidently, this update has changed at least part of the lbfo network adapter teaming subsystem. Instead of fixing some of the network connectivity problems we had already encountered, it seems that in some cases, BSODs may occur on Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts with teamed Intel network adapters.

Like in our case with Emulex network adapters, the temporary workaround was to remove KB2887595 and reinstall the v2 version of KB2887595, then disable VMQ hardware offload. See Michael’s blog for instructions.

The Intel 82599 controller is also used by HP and is known as HP 560FLB Flexible LOM for HP Gen8 blade servers.

Afterthought: if so many different network adapters suffer from serious networking problems, it can be coincidence that all network vendors overlooked something in the testing process. On the other hand we could well face a bug in the NIC teaming subsystem of Windows Server 2012 R2. We will probably not find out before the end of the year.

Despite the trouble you may face, we at Hyper-V.nu wish you a quiet Christmas and a stable 2014!

Currently only one KB article KB2883200 is on the list but it will not take long before this list will grow. KB2773200 was the General Availability Rollup which was delivered at Windows Server 2012 R2 GA release in October 2013. This KB article also recommends to install KB2884846 which is the Windows Server 2012 R2 update rollup for October 2013 and includes “performance and reliability improvements”.

Many of the monthly update rollups for Windows Server 2012 R2 which come via Windows Update hide the exact details of what exactly has been changed or solved. It is very difficult to determine if it is specific to Hyper-V, clustering, networking, storage or all of them.

The December 2013 update rollup KB2903939 is more explicit on what updates have been made but I have a hard time figuring out what critical updates are made for enterprise servers. I have to filter through things like issues with client computers, Lumia 2520 camera app crashes, errors in Windows Live Messenger, mouse pointer stutters, input devices that fail and something that never enters a DRIPS, whatever that may be!

You may or may not have noticed it, but the daily stream of updates around Windows Azure Pack is becoming more and more amazing. The WAP Wiki initiative I took with Marc van Eijk several weeks ago, makes us very aware of all the blogs and articles that are published around Windows Azure Pack, Service Provider Framework, VM Role, Service Management Automation, Usage and Billing and to a lesser extent Database as a Service, Service Bus and Web Sites.

It is more than obvious that a huge amount of Microsoft resources have been dedicated to making the Windows Azure Pack a success. The Building Clouds section on the Microsoft Server & Tools blog which was kicked off by Brad Anderson himself is very active indeed.

Sometimes I see several posts a day coming from the different team members. Guys like Anders Ravnholt, Tiander Turpijn, Jim Britt, Charles Joy, Mark Stanfill, Shiram Natarajan, Thomas Roettinger, Michael Greene, Eamon O Reilly, Justin Incarnato and many more write really interesting blogs that light up the for many still undiscovered possibilities with the Windows Azure Pack. In the community we see good blogs from Marc van Eijk, Walter Eikenboom, Daniel Neumann, Nathan Lasnoski, Michael Rueefli, Joe Thompson, Damian Flynn, Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Lai Yoong Seng and others.

Of course this is only the beginning and we have tons of feature requests for additional functionality. But then, there is so much to learn in this corner of the cloud that many of us can hardly keep up. As one of the initiators of the Hyper-V.nu blog, I’m fully aware that we can build on a superb platform using Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V, System Center 2012 and now with the Windows Azure Pack, Microsoft has just begun to realize its full potential.

If you are looking for an organized index to Windows Azure Pack related subjects, just navigate to the WAP Wiki! There is also @WAzureP tweeting on Windows Azure Pack and related stuff. You can follow @hvredevoort and @_marcvaneijk for regular updates on these topics.

Please help us promote this with a tweet, blog or face… (no nothing on FB please) We use the #WAPack hashtag and suggest you do too!

Today is the 7th day of a Christmas-themed competition that is running through the TechNet Blog. It’s based around the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ carol, and @TechNetUK is giving away a number of prizes on a daily basis between now and 20th Dec. Today our Microsoft Private Cloud Computing book features as one of the prizes,

Head over to the TechNet UK page for further details on how to win of of the prizes.

Thanks to Steven Mullaghan for organizing this competition and featuring the book that was co-authored by Aidan Finn, Damian Flynn, Patrick Lownds and myself.

Note: only entries from the UK will be eligible

WHAT CAN YOU WIN?

Of course if you are not one of the lucky winners, you can still order Microsoft Private Cloud computing here:

Last week I build a Generation 2 virtual machine (Windows Server 2012 R2) which I will be use as a virtual machine template in SCVMM 2012 R2. I build this virtual machine with SCVMM 2012 R2. After building and configuring the virtual machine I have converted the virtual machine to a template and stored the template on a library share.

As soon as the virtual machine was stored in the library I would like to deploy some virtual machines from this template. I started the deploy and I saw that the virtual machine was created succesfully. However during the template rollout the proces stops at step 1.4 (view from the “Jobs” tab):

I switched to the “Summary” view and there I saw the following Error: VMM cannot find the device or this device is not valid for a boot device.

At Inovativ, the company I work for, we more or less use Windows Azure Pack in production now. We have begun to operate as a hoster and each consultant is a tenant in our Inovativ Cloud. They can go to the Windows Azure Pack tenant portal and consume the resources we have available in our cloud. If you don’t set any rules your tenants are likely to grab all the resources that are available. Currently we have not yet set any quotas, but I’m afraid we will have to very soon.

One problem that we encountered was that VMs which were created outside of the portal did not have the correct Owner and User Role. This would mean that those VMs were not visible as owned by a certain tenant in the Windows Azure Pack tenant portal. Also when you set quota on for instance the number of VMs that could be created or the amount of memory that could be consumed, only the VMs were counted that were actually owned by the tenant.

This would be a serious problem if you are a hoster an wanted to move existing VMs to a tenant’s subscription or service plan as it is called in Windows Azure Pack. Another problem that we think is linked to this is that Cloud Cruiser which collects usage information for billing or showback is not able to process the usage records.

This is what it looks like from the admin portal when you go to VM Clouds and find all VMs for a certain tenant and subscription to a tenant plan. As you can see there not all of my VMs are listed.

It was quite easy to give access to the manually added VMs via the VM properties in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2. The first requirement is assign the VM to the same VMM Cloud that is used in Windows Azure Pack. If the VM does not have an Self-Service owner, you can select one. The problem however is that the only accounts you can choose are Active Directory accounts. This is exactly what we don’t want.